The end of an era – RIP John Finnerty

As I sat at my laptop on Sunday morning 24^th September 2023, I received a message from Blarney that an old colleague of mine had passed away. John Finnerty, originally from Mayo, was retired from An Garda Siochana for almost forty years and had reached the ripe old age of ninety-one. His death wasn’t unexpected, but it was still a jolt to the system.

I had four years’ service in An Garda Siochana when I was transferred from Blackrock in Dublin to Blarney Garda Station in Cork in 1983. It seems like a lifetime ago now, but I still remember how strange it felt arriving in the village for the first time having grown used to the hectic life in the capital city. It required a re-set, and I was still very green.

John was one of the first guys I got to work with. He was close to retirement age by then, so we only served together for a couple of years, but I learned a lot from him in that short period of time.

I had heard he wasn’t too well recently, so I went to see him at his home in Blarney. It was a house I was very familiar with once upon a time because himself and his wife Margaret fed me on many occasions. There was always tea on the go.

I hadn’t seen him for a few years, so it was great to catch up with him again. Both of them looked the same as they did all those years ago. Margaret was as glamorous as ever and John was still a fine figure of a man with a full head of hair. It may have been a little greyer but there was plenty of it there.

When I first met him, I knew immediately this guy was the real deal. If you wanted to learn how to police a small community, you couldn’t find a better tutor than John. He was an absolute gentleman, and he had a great way with people. He was as cool as a breeze with an abundance of common sense and experience.

He had plenty of ability too and would have made a fine officer if he had been interested in promotion, but John was a family man and wanted to stay close to home. Forty years later, as I sat beside him at the kitchen table it brought me back to our days sharing a patrol car when we spent many hours side by side. We just needed the uniforms to complete the scene.

We remembered some old colleagues no longer with us and recalled some funny stories. We had fun back then and talking to John, I was reminded how much An Garda Siochana has changed. Policing in those days was much simpler, and I think more enjoyable too, but it was a strange world when it came to administration in local stations. An Garda Siochana had a ferocious appetite for paper.

It was a paper-based system because there were no computers, so when a garda received a complaint from a member of the public or investigated an incident he sent a written report to the sergeant. The sergeant recorded the report and then either returned it to the garda for further attention or sent it up the line to the superintendent. The superintendent then sent it further up the chain of command or back to the sergeant.

With every garda in the Force constantly sending in written reports, there was always a huge volume of paperwork flying about the place. The handwriting wasn’t always the best either so reading some of those took a mixture of detective work and guesswork and it wasn’t unusual for some reports to pass through several hands to be deciphered.

There were many records to be maintained too and there was a register for everything. They were all hard covered books that took up a lot of space. They recorded details of stolen cars, passport applications, traffic accidents, gun-licences and much more.

Young people would be surprised to learn that before mobiles, all phone calls coming into and going out of the station had to be recorded in a register. All personal calls were recorded separately and had to be paid for at the end of the month.

Everyone complained about paperwork back then and it remains one of the major bug bears in the organisation today. Members are still unhappy about the amount of time they are tied to their desks dealing with administration and with the technology available now you would imagine that should be less of a burden, but not so.

Rank and file members complain of being stifled with bureaucracy and oversight and remain opposed to the introduction of the four-shift system. In the meantime, the public are unhappy with the lack of garda visibility and the increasing violence on the streets, so something is amiss.

The commissioner and Minister McEntee deny there is a crisis in the organisation but the recent vote of no confidence in the commissioner has shown a major disconnect between Drew Harris and his frontline officers particularly in relation to the proposal to return to a pre-pandemic roster.

The old three shift system worked fine for eighty years and since they started fiddling with it in the late noughties there has been nothing but problems. Community policing units were depleted to make up the numbers required to support the extra shift and now they are facing even further depletion and I fear it is the end of an era for community engagement.

The death of John Finnerty is a sad loss for his family, friends and all who knew him. The demise of his style of policing is a loss that will be felt by a far larger group.